This Could Hurt

by Jillian Medoff

  “Chaos?” he asked stupidly. “Why do you say that?”

  Donald Lee smirked. “Markets are dead. Money’s dried up. No one’s hiring. But maybe you work in a different United States than I do.” He swiveled his chair to peer out the window.

  SCA Capital was up on the sixtieth floor. From his office, the CFO had a panoramic view of the city; through the window, Kenny saw a bright sun rising. How great would it be if Donald Lee threw an arm across his shoulders and said, “Work for me, kid, and all this could be yours”? Instead the CFO tossed Kenny’s résumé, like a tissue, into the air. Weightless, the paper floated to the floor. “You’re kinda fucked, right, Kenneth?”

  Kenny wouldn’t go that far. Yes, this job market was challenging. Yes, he’d jumped around over the years, so he looked flaky on paper. But it wasn’t all bleak. He was only thirty-four. His GMAT scores were in the ninety-ninth percentile, which had earned him—a black kid from a military family—a free ride at Wharton, BS and MBA. After school, he worked for the big players—Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson—and now oversaw pay and rewards at Ellery, a multimillion-dollar research consortium. He also had a smoking-hot wife, who used to make a shitload of money as a bond trader. So no, Donald Lee—“kinda fucked” was not how Kenny Verville would describe himself. “I prefer Kenny,” he said, plucking his résumé off the floor. “Actually, it’s not a bad time to be looking. Most places cut the deadwood a while ago, so they’re left with skeleton crews. Staff is burned out, and employers are realizing they whittled too close. Hiring should ramp up any day now, right?”

  He nodded at Donald Lee. According to Janine, Kenny should mirror the CFO’s behavior. If, say, Donald Lee cleared his throat, Kenny should clear his throat too (nonverbal reinforcement); he should also parrot back select words and phrases (verbal reinforcement). The idea was to seed the interviewer’s mind with his own tics, so that when decision time came, he’d think, Let’s hire Verville. He’s exactly like me.

  “In fact,” Kenny added, “I’ve spoken to several funds looking to add staff. Seems the downturn ran its course, right?”

  “Hell no.” Donald Lee dismissed Kenny with a wave, apparently not understanding the difference between a rhetorical flourish and an actual question. “You’ve seen unemployment numbers; the whole economy is in the shitter. So let’s talk about . . . uh . . .” Donald Lee again scanned Kenny’s résumé. “Ellery—never heard of it. But my buddy heads up Comp at J&J; claims it’s a real cushy job. Why’d you leave J&J?” He wrinkled his nose a second time.

  Kenny knew his spiel cold. “I was ready for more responsibility, Donald Lee”—another Janine tip: Men love to hear their own names—“At J&J, I was one of twenty comp guys; at Ellery, I run the department. I also advise our CEO on creative ways to restructure.”

  “Downsizing?”

  “Complete gutting—several rounds.”

  “There’s your ten percent uptick, right? More layoffs coming?”

  Kenny nodded. “Yes, probably. We promised employees we were done, but . . .”

  “The check’s in the mail, right?” Donald Lee barked out a laugh, like a seal. “Got good communicators? Makes a difference. Ours sucks. She’s Barry’s niece, right? You met Barry Hardy yet? CEO? No personality, no sensitivity. That’s the niece I’m referring to.” Behind his bangs, Donald Lee’s eyes widened in mock disbelief. “Barry tells me I have a big mouth, so don’t mention I shit-talked his niece. She’s a nice kid, just spoiled and an airhead like her mother, who, by the way, sits on our board.” He seal-barked again. “It’s a fucking family affair!”

  Kenny exhaled. He was starting to like this guy. “I suspect you’re only half kidding, Donald Lee, so I’m happy to introduce you to our VP of comms. Don’t worry—I won’t rat you out. Wharton was full of spoiled kids. I should know—I married one! But I’m not your average suburban prince.” He stopped. According to Janine, Kenny had a terrible habit of overstepping with men in authority (CEOs, fathers-in-law, TSA agents). He misinterpreted social cues, closing down when emotion was required and mistaking polite banter as a call for confession.

  “Oh? What kind of prince are you?”

  Fuck it, he thought. “My dad was career military; he’s retired now. I was at Wharton on scholarship—no money, no rich uncles, no nothing.”

  “No shit.” Donald Lee leaned forward. “My pop is ex-military. Marines. One tough motherfucker. Made me tough, too. You gotta be tough in this business, right?”

  Though Kenny could be thick, he wasn’t stupid. Donald Lee must’ve had it rough coming up on Wall Street some thirty years back—scrawny Asian kid with a bad accent. Talk about balls of steel, this guy was the real deal.

  The big man was checking his Tag. “Nice watch,” Kenny said admiringly.

  Donald Lee nodded, yes, it was. “Let’s keep talking. I think I like you, but I’m not sure yet.” Another seal bark. “You were telling me why you left J&J, right?”

  Kenny sat up. “May I speak candidly, Donald Lee?”

  “Meaning what?” Don brushed away his bangs. “You’ve been full of shit till now?”

  “Ha!” Kenny seal-barked. “I always knew Ellery would be a transitional spot. My real interest is analyzing how performance was rewarded in select historical contexts, then applying those methods to current market cycles, like last year’s correction.” He paused, and Donald Lee nodded, not indifferently, Kenny noted. “Say, for example, you consider employee comp as the dominant factor in satisfaction—wait, let’s back up. You know Maslow’s hierarchy? The pyramid?” Kenny formed a triangle with his fingers. “As you satisfy your base needs, you ascend higher, first to safety, belonging, self-esteem all the way up to morality, creativity, problem solving. ‘What a man can be, he must be.’ Anyway, in the past, pay was a reflection of output, but over time . . .” What was he talking about? Abort! Abort! All Kenny wanted to say was that he had ideas for comp theory vis-à-vis infrastructure, but having wandered into the thicket of his own words, he couldn’t find a clearing. Nor did he have a point.

  Turning to his computer, Donald Lee began pecking at keys.

  “So that’s my blueprint,” Kenny concluded, nonsensically. “I went to P&G and J&J for large corporate experience, then Ellery to see the other side. Now I’m ready to apply this expertise to financial services and make my name.” This wasn’t true, exactly. Kenny’s career trajectory had been a frenetic scramble, with personality conflicts, professional counseling, and extended periods of unemployment along the way. At Wharton, his devotion to studying was legendary. If a subject intrigued him, he’d work seventy-two hours at a clip, with a laser focus that could bend the world’s edges. School was a sanctuary where he chased ideas like rabbits down into whatever random, circuitous holes they traveled. In retrospect, he should’ve stayed for his PhD and become an academic, worn open-collared shirts, comfortable shoes. Instead, he listened to Janine and went high-ticket corporate, only to discover that he wasn’t cut out for the real world. Out here, smart people were made to repeat the same simple tasks over and over until all their intelligence drained out. Out here, Kenny couldn’t get traction. His attention wandered, his already poor listening skills deteriorated. He lost track of time. Missed deadlines. Job-hopped, racking up tenure at five companies in ten years. Usually he quit, once he was fired, but each time a job ended, his relief was palpable. An optimistic man, Kenny felt sure his next one would be different. That one would catapult him above the huddled masses slaving over their pivot tables into the highest echelons of thought leadership. But as soon as he started, boredom would set in, his confidence would peter out, and the cycle would resume: disillusionment, despair, departure.

  “Good to have a plan.” Leaning back, Donald Lee laced his soft hands behind his head. “So tell me about your pop. Army guy, right? Tough motherfucker?”

  Kenny pictured Sarge, eighty years old, still burly and hard, with muscles that bulged when he flexed and cords of veins, like telephone wiring, under his skin.
His dad looked like a brute, but was in fact a gentle giant. “Toughest motherfucker ever. Ooh-rah.” Then Kenny laced his own soft hands behind his head, kicked back, and kept talking.

  KENNY’S INTERVIEW WAS scheduled to be only thirty minutes, but he stayed with Donald Lee for over an hour. When they finally got around to discussing the position, both men agreed Kenny was a perfect fit. (“I could do well here,” Kenny observed, to which Donald Lee said, “Army brats follow the rules; I like that.”) After they shook hands, he caught the A train at Fulton Street, which he rode up to Ellery, elated.

  Janine called just as he stepped off the elevator. “How did it go?” she asked.

  “It’s happening, baby!” Kenny pushed open the glass doors. “The guy loved me. Practically hired me on the spot! The job is mostly strategic—lots of analysis and modeling, along with application—and I’m sure the money is unbelievable.”

  “That’s great, Kenny. Sounds like it’s exactly what you want . . . come here, baby,” she said, clearly talking to Dog. “Give me a kiss.” Three years back, his wife had picked up the bleeding puppy from the side of the road and nursed her back to health. Now they were inseparable.

  “You sound unconvinced.”

  “Concerned. You’ve only been at Ellery a few years, and this is a big—”

  “—leap, I know. More visible, higher risk. I get it. But I’m ready. And guess what? The guy’s father was ex-military. I think that’s what sold him.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Janine said, though without much conviction. She didn’t have anything against the military, but she didn’t have anything for it either.

  “Gotta go,” Kenny said, turning the corner. “Love you.”

  Inside his office (which wasn’t a true office but a cubicle with makeshift walls, no ceiling, and a flimsy door), he estimated how long it would take him to pack up. His shelves were loaded with vacation memorabilia—beer steins from Munich, Hawaiian leis, a mini Big Ben—and books he’d been lugging from job to job—finance textbooks, The Art of War, 500-page tomes on comp theory. On his walls were diplomas, a Penn pennant, and framed photos of him and Janine in cities the world over. He glanced at his favorite, a candid shot taken on Christmas Day a year earlier in front of their house. Janine’s hair had been longer then and hung to her shoulders in face-framing waves. Her skin, darker than his, was the color of a ripened cherry. She favored flamboyant clothing: orange tunics and flowing dresses paired with sky-high heels that showed off her calves. They stood arm-in-arm on the steps, wearing his-and-her versions of the same black cashmere coat—same cut, same maxi length, same luxurious silk lining, Janine’s in lavender, Kenny’s dark grey. The matching coats were gifts from Janine’s parents for their birthdays. “Christmas babies!” Mrs. Jamison had exclaimed so many times during their courtship that it became a family joke. Janine was born on December 19 and Kenny on the twentieth, so neither was a true Christmas baby, but his in-laws waited until the holiday to bestow their birthday gifts, which were, invariably, his-and-hers and extravagant: coats, cars, Cartier watches, Louis Vuitton luggage.

  He heard a knock. “Kenny, it’s Rosa. Do you have a minute?” Without waiting for an answer, she stepped into his office, stopping Katherine, who was behind her. “I need to speak with Kenny alone. I’ll only be a minute.” Rosa tried to close the door, but loose on its hinges, it swung wildly and slammed in Katherine’s face. “Sorry about that!”

  “No problem” was the younger woman’s muffled reply.

  Lowering herself into a chair, Rosa sighed from the effort. “I thought you and I might have a chat.” She crossed her ankles and smoothed her suit, every move slow and deliberate.

  The first time Kenny met Rosa, he was impressed by her poise and polish, especially compared to the very fat Leo, who sat in on the entire interview, unspeaking, for reasons never explained. Then, once he was hired, he learned she was shrewd and a supportive boss. Honestly, Kenny liked Rosa very much as a person. He respected her as an elder; she’d fought the good fight and survived. But as a business leader, Rosa had critical limitations. She was plodding and unevolved, like most older managers who came of age without technology. What mattered in the twenty-first century was synergy, automation, and fast-moving systems rooted in solid org theory, not the slow putt-putt of outdated worker-centric business models. Rosa’s Big Idea was to invest in employees, which was fine if you had a machine that could time-travel back to 1995. In current thinking, people were only as valuable as the underlying processes; intellectual capital could be outsourced, so systems should allow for interchangeable staff—cheap labor, quick turnover, that’s what yielded profits. Rutherford understood this. Rosa did not, or rather, she understood but didn’t care. Nor did she “believe” in telecommuting, and she required her group to show up every damn day. This drove Kenny mad. Why invent new business tools, like Citrix and teleconferencing, if you don’t allow your employees to use them?

  “Please tell Leo about that door, Kenny,” Rosa said. “If we don’t get it fixed, someone will get hurt. Most accidents happen in the workplace, you know.”

  “You mean the home,” he corrected her, offering a bright smile.

  “No, the workplace. When people get hurt at home, it’s not my problem. In the office, it’s my dime, otherwise known as workman’s comp.” She paused. “So how are things?”

  “Good—great, actually. Janine is in talks with UBS for a new job.” He chuckled. “My wife isn’t exactly the happy homemaker, so she’s thrilled.” Unlike Kenny’s, Janine’s career as a trader had been a steady upward climb—until it wasn’t. After school, she went to Citigroup and then Goldman and then Lehman, where she stayed until the summer of 2008. She was laid off in June, a few months before the big kaboom, when the appetite for asset-backed securities had already thinned and Lehman needed sacrificial lambs. That was an awful day: Janine out on the street, holding her box of family photos and mugs, sobbing into the phone to him. She wanted to dive right back in, but Kenny convinced her to take a few months off. By the time she began looking in earnest, Bear had been consumed by JPMorgan, Merrill by Bank of America, Lehman was gone, and everyone else was on the brink. Ordinarily she’d have no problem finding something, but now it was two years later, and she was still on the dole. (For which, in his darker moments, Kenny blamed himself.)

  “Good for Janine.” Rosa’s voice was terse. “But when I asked how things are, I was referring to your job, here, at Ellery. Kenny, you missed our senior staff meeting this morning. You didn’t get in until ten, nor did you call.”

  “I apologize.” Booting up his computer, Kenny studied the screen. He preferred not to look directly at Rosa. She had been sick recently (bronchitis? sinus infection? SARS?), and her recovery was slow. Even now, she moved sluggishly, and drooped in her chair like a leaf-heavy tree. When she spoke, her speech was slow and dragged as though the words were being pulled from her mouth. It seemed like she’d had a stroke, but when Kenny suggested this, Lucy had rolled her eyes. Even so, Lucy didn’t deny that something had shifted for Rosa, mentally, in the past few months. Maybe a guy like Hal Foster in Finance didn’t notice—which Kenny knew because they’d discussed it—but Hal wasn’t with Rosa every day; he didn’t sit next to her in meetings, close enough to see where her lipstick bled into the micro-crevices of her skin. Kenny did, and there were times when Rosa would drift off mid-thought or raise an unrelated topic and derail the conversation. Yet no one acknowledged it! Lucy balked when he mentioned it, Leo ignored him, and Rob was in his own world. These were people whose livelihoods depended on Rosa’s ability to reason! So Kenny’s next step was to alert Rutherford, with whom he had a fairly close working relationship. If Rosa was impaired, her manager—who happened to be Ellery’s CEO—should know.

  “That was a question,” Rosa said sharply. “Where were you this morning?”

  “Oh, sorry, Rosa. I had an asthma attack! I ducked into a walk-in clinic.” Kenny didn’t know if she’d believe this, but he also didn
’t care. “Just allergies, thankfully. Scary, though.”

  “We waited fifteen minutes. We also tried calling—several times. I’m sorry you didn’t feel well, but turning off your phone is disrespectful to your colleagues.”

  “Again, I apologize; it was an oversight. Hey, is Lucy here? I have a question for her.”

  “If you’d been at our meeting, you’d know Lucy’s whereabouts.”

  As Rosa went on to catalog everything Kenny had missed, he worked out the start date for his new job. Donald Lee wanted him to meet a few more people, which would take until mid-April. An offer might not come until a day or two later, and of course he’d counter. Offer two would take a day or two more, and again, he’d counter. But assuming they could hammer out a deal, he’d give two weeks (or not—he wouldn’t mind a vacation) and start in May.

  Kenny realized Rosa was staring at him. “Sorry, Rosa. What about June?”

  “Another restructuring. Rutherford wants a clean slate by Q3.” She sighed. “We’ll have a mutiny, just watch. We swore we were done with the layoffs. We promised.”

  Kenny was imagining beaches and blue water. Luckily, Janine might have a new job too, thanks to Les Hough, who had been her boss at Lehman and was now at UBS. If so, Bermuda could be a celebratory trip for both of them.

  “Kenny?”

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  Rosa erupted. “Dammit, Kenny, you have to focus! The numbers are terrible; Rutherford is on the warpath. We ended 2009 down thirty percent; now we’re down twenty, and we’re not even halfway through the year.”

  “I know,” he said calmly, but it was too late. Rosa had launched into a Rant. That. Would. Not. End. Tuning her out, he watched the turkey flesh flutter under her chin. She was so excited her glasses kept slipping, and she used her middle finger to push them up. Kenny was dying to whip out his phone, get a shot of her flipping the bird, and send it to Janine.